The Secret to Great Employee Retention? Stay Interviews
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If you haven’t heard of it, you may think that a stay interview is the same as an exit interview - something you conduct when an employee is heading out the door (and by which time it is much too late to change their minds).
In reality, it’s a way to check in with your employees and take corrective action before leaving for greener pastures ever enters their minds.
While we spend countless hours and a great deal of money on hiring top talent, we don’t always put the same effort into keeping them.
A stay interview is a valuable component of your retention strategy as it gives you insight into what motivates your employees to stay with your company, and what might cause them to leave.
If turnover is an issue in your business, stay interviews will help you get to the reason behind it.
Schedule your stay interviews in advance, so employees know they are important and have time to prepare, and avoid asking closed-ended questions that can be answered yes or no, such as “do you like working here?”; the aim is to get them talking.
Here are some questions to help you learn what keeps your employees coming to work, and what might be driving them away:
What was a highlight for you in the last three months?
If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about your work, your team, or the company as a whole, what would it be and why?
How would you rate your work-life balance?
When did you last think about leaving our business and what prompted it?
How do you feel about the opportunities for professional development you have here? Is there anything you would add?
How can we help you achieve your goals?
When did you last feel like you had a really good day at work?
What additional support or feedback can we provide you?
The answers to these questions should provide invaluable insight into what makes your employees tick and help you make a positive impact on your retention rate.
However, if you don’t act on the feedback you receive, the stay interview is useless. Worse, by ignoring the thoughts and critiques shared by your employees, you break trust and appear insincere, which may ultimately have a negative effect on retention.
Replacing your top performers can be expensive and time-consuming. Stay interviews are an easy and effective method to help you retain your business’s key employees.
